František Tureček was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he received a PhD in organic chemistry from Charles University in 1977. In 1987 he and his family left Czechoslovakia and, after spending a year in a refugee camp, they moved to the United States where he joined Fred McLafferty at Cornell University. In 1990 he joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at University of Washington, Seattle, as Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 1995. In 2013 he was appointed the Klaus and Mary Ann Saegebarth Endowed Professor of Chemistry. His research interests have been in the chemistry of highly reactive molecules (enols, sulfenic acids), hypervalent radicals, nucleobase radicals related to DNA damage, and peptide radicals and cation-radicals. His other interests include mass spectrometric instrumentation, gas-phase ion chemistry, ion-surface interactions (soft and reactive landing), and applications to proteomics, clinical analysis, and newborn screening. He is author of >420 scientific papers, three books, and several patents.He is one of the founding Editors of Journal of Mass Spectrometry and has been on the editorial advisory boards of International Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. Among his recent awards are the P. B. Hopkins Faculty Award (2006), the Czech Head-Patria Science Prize (2010), the Johannes Marcus Marci Spectroscopy Award (2010), the Thomson Medal of the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation (2012), and the John Gustavus Esselen Award for Chemistry in the Public Interest from the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (2013). He is a Honorary Member of the Czech Mass Spectrometry Society. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.